9 ms·

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

245 points by gunnarde 10y ago

unexistance 10y ago
so far so good, pretty detailed too some might care images / screenshot, not me tho :D
ekianjo 10y ago
> back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001) The snark was really unnecessary.
- bertiewhykovich 10y ago
  it was good
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  I agree, I've been running Arch Linux on my MBP Retina for 2+ years now almost without problems. I bet if the OP tried Linux, they'd be absolutely fine.
  - halcyonblue 10y ago
    I've been running Arch linux on my MacBook Air for the past week. Motivated by a strong desire to run StumpWM, I couldn't be happier with the results.
    - cyberpunk 10y ago
      Unfortunately linux doesn't seem to play well with the 'macbook' models keyboard(s) -- I guess that probably applies to the new pros too. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99891 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99891
  - rhubarbquid 10y ago
    Linux was the only OS on my desktop in 1994...
  - plg 10y ago
    how is battery life? does close-lid-to-sleep and open-lid-to-wake work?
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Yup, works great out of the box.
    - lllr_finger 10y ago
      I've been running Arch on a Dell Chromebook and battery life and sleep/wake are essentially the same as with ChromeOS from what I've seen so far. Awesome experience.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Sure, but then they'd have to deal with Linux. /s
boterock 10y ago
Some months ago I got FreeBSD running in a Macbook Air, and surprisingly the UEFI boot worked out of the box. I say surprisingly because when I tried, the Linux efiboot didn't work, the only way to boot linux was through GRUB. I had almost everything working (Audio, suspend on close, i3 or gnome) but never got the wifi to work, I even tethered from my android phone to the Macbook and it worked very good. But in the end it was to annoying to do often. If only FreeBSD supported that wireless chip, I'd be writing this on FreeBSD. When the wayland and updated intel drivers come to FreeBSD maybe i'll try it again, but wifi is a deal breaker. I always wondered why there isn't wifi drivers for this macbook in FreeBSD if Fedora had them (and AFAIK Fedora only ships open drivers)
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Which FreeBSD version did you try? I'm just skimming things, but it looks like Adrian Chadd might have updated the relevant driver back in May/June, in time for FreeBSD 11.
  - mveety 10y ago
    If its for the broadcom cards that's probably still a negative. I was running 11-CURRENT up until the release freeze and it never started working. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if Adrian has it working by now.
    - gonzo 10y ago
      Adrian has done a lot of recent work on 11ac in -HEAD, but not anything on BRCM of late.
- BorisMelnik 10y ago
  ever considered using a supported wifi usb?
  - Macuyiko 10y ago
    That's what I ended up doing for a lot of my laptops as well. These things have become so small you barely see them taking up a USB port.
wavefunction 10y ago
stunts for stunts' sake
- webaholic 10y ago
  That's how a lot of great projects got started.
dataharry 10y ago
That was anticlimactic
- ychompinator 10y ago
  and 2 years old
JeremyMorgan 10y ago
I really want to try this out. I was a heavy FreeBSD user for many years in the 2000s, and I drifted back into Linux. One thing I will say for FreeBSD, it's harder to get dialed in but once it is, it's very solid. I think with enough tinkering FreeBSD would run really well on a MBP, I just wonder if it would provide a lot of advantages over OSX to make it worth the time.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Random question for you, how does the shell experience on FreeBSD compare to MacOS? Linux?
  - mveety 10y ago
    A shell is a shell for the most part. The details can be a bit different (like your $PATH), but otherwise its largely the same.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      try rm -rf somedir/ vs rm somedir/ -rf Linux (the former) allows me to be lazy while MacOS (the latter) forces me to hit crtl-a and insert -rf.
      - loeg 10y ago
        GNU rm (coreutils) vs BSD rm.
        aorth 10y ago
        I will never get used to the trailing slash on source arguments in BSD cp (that copies directory contents rather than the directory itself)! The first thing I do on an OS X machine is install GNU coreutils.
        loeg 10y ago
95014_refugee 10y ago
"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM" This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  I thought the exact same thing. It's trivially simple to run custom kernels. Further, with currentish versions of OSX, you don't even need VMware/VB. The built-in hypervisor works good enough without crash prone kexts like in the alternative in my experience. Not sure if you read the rest of the article, but it didn't do much to instill technical competence after that point either.
  - verandaguy 10y ago
    Not claiming to be knowledgeable about OS X internals, but... it ships with a hypervisor now? Is it at all similar to BSD jails?
    - gonzo 10y ago
      No, but there is a port of bhyve using the MacOS hypervisor.framework https://github.com/mist64/xhyve https://github.com/mist64/xhyve
      - danieldk 10y ago
        Or, if you want something with a GUI, there is Veertu: https://veertu.com/ https://veertu.com/
    - rhubarbquid 10y ago
      It's been there since 10.10: https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor
    - floatboth 10y ago
eth0up 10y ago
My experience with FreeBSD is limited to a fugacious week with apparent quixotism and my noble Raspberry-Pi2, which ended inimically. All seemed rigorously dandy until presumably, Chuck Norris imposed thereafter some wicked temporal augmentation between all moments between any character typed or program otherwise compiled, offering only a typographic respite or scintillating scroll of never-ending techno-glossolalia in his wake whilst I sat there hour after hour (or character after character) awaiting something that made sense. Having no visible recourse, I capitulated and returned to Rasbpian. With my compulsive - but hitherto compromised - aversion to running Linux within the virtual-machine of Systemd, I have ever-since intended to try again, maybe with a Pi3 and/or laptop, or even Mac. I've wangled Debian on a Macbook, but would, considering circumstances, prefer FreeBSD. I hope there is promise here. I praise all efforts.
- floatboth 10y ago
  That's odd. Are you using HDMI or the serial console? My Raspberry Pi 2 runs FreeBSD very well. Currently running OpenNTPD + Monit + Postgres + Node-RED + go-carbon + graphite-api + Grafana + Syncthing + Transmission — all of this with only 249 MB of RAM used. FreeBSD's memory management is excellent. RPi 3 (native AArch64 mode) support is in progress https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 for now it runs only on one CPU core, SMP is "actively being worked on".
  - eth0up 10y ago
    >Are you using HDMI I was using HDMI. As mentioned, I've since returned to Raspbian, where I continue to use HDMI and all works generally well. I was initially thrilled after installing FreeBSD, but for whatever reason, things changed. I remember compiling vim for a whole day before cancelling it. I could type an entire sentence or paragraph before any input would show. Bad luck perhaps. My primary use for the Pi is a surveillance camera, so I temporarily abandoned BSD for what I know works. I intend to make my next main system a BSD system. Presently I am running Debian Testing, which has been quite excellent, but as also mentioned, I am bothered by Systemd and aspire to be free of it.
jrcii 10y ago
Fuck Scott@HN liberal piece of shit
wwweston 10y ago
> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. So... it's not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else. If people aren't going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?
- meekins 10y ago
  Homebrew and a Vagrant managed Linux VM depending on the situation. I'm seriously considering moving to Linux next time I'm switching my work laptop.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    Did this at work, haven't looked back since. Having first class package management support is something I never want to live without again. I still use a lot of virtual machines, but mostly to keep different projects separated. By the way, is it just me or have the vms better disk performance but slower graphics in Linux?
  - wwweston 10y ago
    Any particular software you host your VM in? How easy/hard is it to get the VM networking with the host machine?
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  The problem for me is OSX still takes less maintenance than Linux and provides a higher quality experience than Linux. I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicated GPU is both in use and out of use until you run a graphical benchmark and measure the current draw of your laptop) And I prefer Homebrew to apt. I've never had Homebrew fail to install other packages because I had a package install break previously, which is always something that drove me nuts about apt.
GirlsCanCode 10y ago
I wouldn't think of running any Unix on a machine without an ESC key.
mkup 10y ago
This tutorial is about FreeBSD 11-CURRENT snapshot 20150111 (pre-release version), so it deals in act II with hybrid UFS/ZFS setup, but FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE supports root-on-ZFS-in-UEFI-mode via standard installer. Release version of boot1.efi loader fully supports ZFS, so small UFS boot partition is no longer needed, and things are much simpler now.
- mpasternacki 10y ago
  It doesn't work yet with GELI as far as I know, so for encrypted root /boot still needs to be on a separate partition. There was some work to support encrypted /boot, I'm not sure where it stands now, but I'd be very surprised if it supported encrypted ZFS.
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    Yeah, I've not tried going to 11x yet as I'm not sure I can be bothered trying to deal with replacing the non-geli 'bootpool' I have on 10.x.. Sounds like a tricky process. I'll probably just rebuild it instead of trying to upgrade.
lorenzfx 10y ago
I'm using FreeBSD on Lenovo X220, and while it's obviously no MacBook, everything important to me (wifi, suspend-to-ram, graphic support, long battery usage, HDMI out) just worked out of the box (apart from the initial install, which wasn't FreeBSD's but Lenovo's fault and is since being worked around in recent FreeBSD installers). I can really recommend it if you want to give FreeBSD a try on a Laptop.
- lorenzfx 10y ago
  ps: make sure you get a wifi card that is supported by FreeBSD. While you can put in a supported one, the X220 won't boot because Lenovo put a Wifi card whitelist into the BIOS and you need to install a patched BIOS from a dubious source.
  - kefka 10y ago
    Why in Richard Stallman's name would you buy a Lenovo?
enzolovesbacon 10y ago
I'm periodically installing FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T400 to see how it's performing with Chromium. It's the only application I use extensively, and the only one that performs really bad with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD also), which prevents me from switching from Fedora. Is there any magic I'm missing, aside from the shared memory support?
- floatboth 10y ago
  It performs fine on my X240 without doing anything.
- kevans91 10y ago
  FWIW- Chromium was realllly unstable until the recent 52 -> 54 update that took place on the 22nd. Since then, it seems to be a lot more stable and performs better (on my crap hardware). I would definitely give it another shot.
mpasternacki 10y ago
I’m author of that gist (just noticed I have some comments there I need to reply to), still running the setup, now with FreeBSD 12-CURRENT. Tl;dr it generally works, still no wi-fi support. X works fine (running with drm-next-4.7 patches to get external thunderbolt display to work; vanilla kernel works fine with built-in and DVI display, gets confused by Thunderbolt display only). Gave up on pkg because I want to control my build flags, I’m using portmaster now and thinking about setting up poudriere on a bigger server. Feel free to ask if you have any particular questions.
- synthmeat 10y ago
  Give https://github.com/jrmarino/synth https://github.com/jrmarino/synth a whirl.
  - mpasternacki 10y ago
    Looks nice, thanks!
- gkop 10y ago
  So to be clear, no Thunderbolt display working yet?
  - mpasternacki 10y ago
    Not in HEAD, but https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next-4.7 https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree... is stable in my experience
    - cyberpunk 10y ago
      I'm running two external screens (one thunderbolt, one via the hdmi port) on unpatched 10.3 without any issue on my mbp... I can use the laptop display at the same time also (usually don't -- but I have to close the lid before I start X otherwise it'll stay on) ....? Is it just your model? It;s behind my desk but it's some cheapo thunderbolt->hdmi dongle made by "neeto" apparently, works well enough.. [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): connected [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): Internal TMDS [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): 340.0 MHz maximum pixel clock [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): connected [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): Internal TMDS [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): 165.0 MHz maximum pixel clock [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): connected [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): Internal DisplayPort [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): 480.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
bootload 10y ago
plz keep posting and upvoting these kinds of stories (foss on hardware), great read.

245 points by gunnarde 10y ago

so far so good, pretty detailed too some might care images / screenshot, not me tho :D

> back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001) The snark was really unnecessary.

bertiewhykovich 10y ago
it was good
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
I agree, I've been running Arch Linux on my MBP Retina for 2+ years now almost without problems. I bet if the OP tried Linux, they'd be absolutely fine.
- halcyonblue 10y ago
  I've been running Arch linux on my MacBook Air for the past week. Motivated by a strong desire to run StumpWM, I couldn't be happier with the results.
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    Unfortunately linux doesn't seem to play well with the 'macbook' models keyboard(s) -- I guess that probably applies to the new pros too. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99891 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99891
- rhubarbquid 10y ago
  Linux was the only OS on my desktop in 1994...
- plg 10y ago
  how is battery life? does close-lid-to-sleep and open-lid-to-wake work?
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Yup, works great out of the box.
  - lllr_finger 10y ago
    I've been running Arch on a Dell Chromebook and battery life and sleep/wake are essentially the same as with ChromeOS from what I've seen so far. Awesome experience.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Sure, but then they'd have to deal with Linux. /s

boterock 10y ago

Some months ago I got FreeBSD running in a Macbook Air, and surprisingly the UEFI boot worked out of the box. I say surprisingly because when I tried, the Linux efiboot didn't work, the only way to boot linux was through GRUB. I had almost everything working (Audio, suspend on close, i3 or gnome) but never got the wifi to work, I even tethered from my android phone to the Macbook and it worked very good. But in the end it was to annoying to do often. If only FreeBSD supported that wireless chip, I'd be writing this on FreeBSD. When the wayland and updated intel drivers come to FreeBSD maybe i'll try it again, but wifi is a deal breaker. I always wondered why there isn't wifi drivers for this macbook in FreeBSD if Fedora had them (and AFAIK Fedora only ships open drivers)

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Which FreeBSD version did you try? I'm just skimming things, but it looks like Adrian Chadd might have updated the relevant driver back in May/June, in time for FreeBSD 11.
- mveety 10y ago
  If its for the broadcom cards that's probably still a negative. I was running 11-CURRENT up until the release freeze and it never started working. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if Adrian has it working by now.
  - gonzo 10y ago
    Adrian has done a lot of recent work on 11ac in -HEAD, but not anything on BRCM of late.
BorisMelnik 10y ago
ever considered using a supported wifi usb?
- Macuyiko 10y ago
  That's what I ended up doing for a lot of my laptops as well. These things have become so small you barely see them taking up a USB port.

wavefunction 10y ago

stunts for stunts' sake

webaholic 10y ago
That's how a lot of great projects got started.

dataharry 10y ago

That was anticlimactic

ychompinator 10y ago
and 2 years old

JeremyMorgan 10y ago

I really want to try this out. I was a heavy FreeBSD user for many years in the 2000s, and I drifted back into Linux. One thing I will say for FreeBSD, it's harder to get dialed in but once it is, it's very solid. I think with enough tinkering FreeBSD would run really well on a MBP, I just wonder if it would provide a lot of advantages over OSX to make it worth the time.

noobermin 10y ago
Random question for you, how does the shell experience on FreeBSD compare to MacOS? Linux?
- mveety 10y ago
  A shell is a shell for the most part. The details can be a bit different (like your $PATH), but otherwise its largely the same.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    try rm -rf somedir/ vs rm somedir/ -rf Linux (the former) allows me to be lazy while MacOS (the latter) forces me to hit crtl-a and insert -rf.
    - loeg 10y ago
      GNU rm (coreutils) vs BSD rm.
      - aorth 10y ago
        I will never get used to the trailing slash on source arguments in BSD cp (that copies directory contents rather than the directory itself)! The first thing I do on an OS X machine is install GNU coreutils.
        loeg 10y ago

95014_refugee 10y ago

"using a custom [FreeBSD] kernel seems tricky in a VMWare/VirtualBox VM" This flipped a set-once bit, making the rest of the article essentially unreadable due to zero confidence in the writer's technical skill. Also, the lack of "late 2011" in the title makes it pretty misleading.

jsjohnst 10y ago
I thought the exact same thing. It's trivially simple to run custom kernels. Further, with currentish versions of OSX, you don't even need VMware/VB. The built-in hypervisor works good enough without crash prone kexts like in the alternative in my experience. Not sure if you read the rest of the article, but it didn't do much to instill technical competence after that point either.
- verandaguy 10y ago
  Not claiming to be knowledgeable about OS X internals, but... it ships with a hypervisor now? Is it at all similar to BSD jails?
  - gonzo 10y ago
    No, but there is a port of bhyve using the MacOS hypervisor.framework https://github.com/mist64/xhyve https://github.com/mist64/xhyve
    - danieldk 10y ago
      Or, if you want something with a GUI, there is Veertu: https://veertu.com/ https://veertu.com/
  - rhubarbquid 10y ago
    It's been there since 10.10: https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor
  - floatboth 10y ago

eth0up 10y ago

My experience with FreeBSD is limited to a fugacious week with apparent quixotism and my noble Raspberry-Pi2, which ended inimically. All seemed rigorously dandy until presumably, Chuck Norris imposed thereafter some wicked temporal augmentation between all moments between any character typed or program otherwise compiled, offering only a typographic respite or scintillating scroll of never-ending techno-glossolalia in his wake whilst I sat there hour after hour (or character after character) awaiting something that made sense. Having no visible recourse, I capitulated and returned to Rasbpian. With my compulsive - but hitherto compromised - aversion to running Linux within the virtual-machine of Systemd, I have ever-since intended to try again, maybe with a Pi3 and/or laptop, or even Mac. I've wangled Debian on a Macbook, but would, considering circumstances, prefer FreeBSD. I hope there is promise here. I praise all efforts.

floatboth 10y ago
That's odd. Are you using HDMI or the serial console? My Raspberry Pi 2 runs FreeBSD very well. Currently running OpenNTPD + Monit + Postgres + Node-RED + go-carbon + graphite-api + Grafana + Syncthing + Transmission — all of this with only 249 MB of RAM used. FreeBSD's memory management is excellent. RPi 3 (native AArch64 mode) support is in progress https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 for now it runs only on one CPU core, SMP is "actively being worked on".
- eth0up 10y ago
  >Are you using HDMI I was using HDMI. As mentioned, I've since returned to Raspbian, where I continue to use HDMI and all works generally well. I was initially thrilled after installing FreeBSD, but for whatever reason, things changed. I remember compiling vim for a whole day before cancelling it. I could type an entire sentence or paragraph before any input would show. Bad luck perhaps. My primary use for the Pi is a surveillance camera, so I temporarily abandoned BSD for what I know works. I intend to make my next main system a BSD system. Presently I am running Debian Testing, which has been quite excellent, but as also mentioned, I am bothered by Systemd and aspire to be free of it.

jrcii 10y ago

Fuck Scott@HN liberal piece of shit

wwweston 10y ago

> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. So... it's not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else. If people aren't going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

meekins 10y ago
Homebrew and a Vagrant managed Linux VM depending on the situation. I'm seriously considering moving to Linux next time I'm switching my work laptop.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Did this at work, haven't looked back since. Having first class package management support is something I never want to live without again. I still use a lot of virtual machines, but mostly to keep different projects separated. By the way, is it just me or have the vms better disk performance but slower graphics in Linux?
- wwweston 10y ago
  Any particular software you host your VM in? How easy/hard is it to get the VM networking with the host machine?
BoorishBears 10y ago
The problem for me is OSX still takes less maintenance than Linux and provides a higher quality experience than Linux. I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicated GPU is both in use and out of use until you run a graphical benchmark and measure the current draw of your laptop) And I prefer Homebrew to apt. I've never had Homebrew fail to install other packages because I had a package install break previously, which is always something that drove me nuts about apt.

GirlsCanCode 10y ago

I wouldn't think of running any Unix on a machine without an ESC key.

mkup 10y ago

This tutorial is about FreeBSD 11-CURRENT snapshot 20150111 (pre-release version), so it deals in act II with hybrid UFS/ZFS setup, but FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE supports root-on-ZFS-in-UEFI-mode via standard installer. Release version of boot1.efi loader fully supports ZFS, so small UFS boot partition is no longer needed, and things are much simpler now.

mpasternacki 10y ago
It doesn't work yet with GELI as far as I know, so for encrypted root /boot still needs to be on a separate partition. There was some work to support encrypted /boot, I'm not sure where it stands now, but I'd be very surprised if it supported encrypted ZFS.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Yeah, I've not tried going to 11x yet as I'm not sure I can be bothered trying to deal with replacing the non-geli 'bootpool' I have on 10.x.. Sounds like a tricky process. I'll probably just rebuild it instead of trying to upgrade.

lorenzfx 10y ago

I'm using FreeBSD on Lenovo X220, and while it's obviously no MacBook, everything important to me (wifi, suspend-to-ram, graphic support, long battery usage, HDMI out) just worked out of the box (apart from the initial install, which wasn't FreeBSD's but Lenovo's fault and is since being worked around in recent FreeBSD installers). I can really recommend it if you want to give FreeBSD a try on a Laptop.

lorenzfx 10y ago
ps: make sure you get a wifi card that is supported by FreeBSD. While you can put in a supported one, the X220 won't boot because Lenovo put a Wifi card whitelist into the BIOS and you need to install a patched BIOS from a dubious source.
- kefka 10y ago
  Why in Richard Stallman's name would you buy a Lenovo?

enzolovesbacon 10y ago

I'm periodically installing FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T400 to see how it's performing with Chromium. It's the only application I use extensively, and the only one that performs really bad with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD also), which prevents me from switching from Fedora. Is there any magic I'm missing, aside from the shared memory support?

floatboth 10y ago
It performs fine on my X240 without doing anything.
kevans91 10y ago
FWIW- Chromium was realllly unstable until the recent 52 -> 54 update that took place on the 22nd. Since then, it seems to be a lot more stable and performs better (on my crap hardware). I would definitely give it another shot.

mpasternacki 10y ago

I’m author of that gist (just noticed I have some comments there I need to reply to), still running the setup, now with FreeBSD 12-CURRENT. Tl;dr it generally works, still no wi-fi support. X works fine (running with drm-next-4.7 patches to get external thunderbolt display to work; vanilla kernel works fine with built-in and DVI display, gets confused by Thunderbolt display only). Gave up on pkg because I want to control my build flags, I’m using portmaster now and thinking about setting up poudriere on a bigger server. Feel free to ask if you have any particular questions.

synthmeat 10y ago
Give https://github.com/jrmarino/synth https://github.com/jrmarino/synth a whirl.
- mpasternacki 10y ago
  Looks nice, thanks!
gkop 10y ago
So to be clear, no Thunderbolt display working yet?
- mpasternacki 10y ago
  Not in HEAD, but https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next-4.7 https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree... is stable in my experience
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    I'm running two external screens (one thunderbolt, one via the hdmi port) on unpatched 10.3 without any issue on my mbp... I can use the laptop display at the same time also (usually don't -- but I have to close the lid before I start X otherwise it'll stay on) ....? Is it just your model? It;s behind my desk but it's some cheapo thunderbolt->hdmi dongle made by "neeto" apparently, works well enough.. [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): connected [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): Internal TMDS [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-2): 340.0 MHz maximum pixel clock [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): connected [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): Internal TMDS [ 131.802] (--) NVIDIA(0): BenQ GL2450H (DFP-0): 165.0 MHz maximum pixel clock [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): connected [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): Internal DisplayPort [ 131.865] (--) NVIDIA(0): Apple Color LCD (DFP-3): 480.0 MHz maximum pixel clock

bootload 10y ago

plz keep posting and upvoting these kinds of stories (foss on hardware), great read.